Stories for Tomorrow – Lived Today, Everywhere

Wedding high-tech and traditional materials

Wedding high-tech and traditional materials

Architect Péter Pozsár is on a mission to ease social woes in eastern Hungary: building 7,000 new homes in five years while lowering the region’s high unemployment rates.

In
Hungary, the idea of building your own home does not exactly have
positive connotations: high costs, conflicts with the building
companies, family members on the verge of exhaustion. The financial
burden is the most daunting aspect for would-be home builders.

Olcsóház—An
opportunity for many

A new project offers
a cost-efficient alternative for prospective private home builders.
It mainly targets young, college-educated people, many of whom net
only 100,000–150,000 forint a month (approximately 340–510
euros). A 50,000-euro property in Budapest, for example, is virtually
out of their financial reach unless they take on lifelong debt.

This is why
architect Péter Pozsár calls his project “Olcsóház,”
which means “Cheap House.” In Western Europe, the label “cheap”
is often associated with a lack of quality, but that is not the case
here. A fundamental element of traditional East European creativity
is the principle of working with what you have in the most
cost-efficient manner possible. The developers of the “cheap house”
created an architectural solution that may not be built for
eternity—a house of this kind has an expected life span of about 30
years—but that lasts long enough for two generations to grow up in
it.

Old techniques newly combined

In 2009, Pozsár had
an idea on how to revive the Hungarian building industry while making
a difference in the social sphere. “Reading EU research development
tenders, I came across more and more calls for proposals that
re-combine existing elements into something new and unusual,” he
says. “This means that the EU not only supports entirely novel
ideas but also promotes blending existing concepts and traditions.
Such as the traditional Hungarian art of molding adobe bricks in
combination with modern concrete construction techniques.”

His concept is based
on the simple fact that Hungary is extremely rich in traditional raw
building materials such as adobe, straw, reed, rock, and clay. It was
no coincidence that at the turn of the last century Hungary had the
highest density of brick factories in all of Central and Eastern
Europe. The brick trade remains an export industry to this day. And
traditional manufacturing techniques, such as the craft of molding
adobe bricks, are still alive in Hungary.

Locals build their
own homes

The county of
Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén in northeast Hungary is the country's most
disadvantaged region, both economically and socially, which is why
the module house project mostly focuses on this area. Instead of
earmarking the entire local adobe brick production for export, the
goal is to give locals the opportunity to build their own homes from
local materials. Building such a structure will cost less than 20,000
euros: The houses are to be assembled from pre-built modules that are
manufactured by local firms. Once properly trained, locals will be
able to simply put the modules together, which eliminates the need
for subcontractors who often rack up huge additional bills.

The expertise needed
to build the module houses can be taught in a simple tutorial. This
can also help lower the ever-increasing unemployment rates among the
rural population, strengthen the labor market, help put many people
to work by enhancing their skills, ease social tensions in the
economically underdeveloped regions, and slow the steady exodus of
the younger generations.

The project has
multiple benefits: jobs are created, time-honored technologies are
rediscovered. In addition, the program promotes social integration
because it takes a joint effort to build the houses. That means
everyone must work shoulder to shoulder and help each other out.

The module houses
require continuous upkeep. Since local residents are trained in the
required building skills, this can also have a community-building
effect, in the vein of “If I fix your fence, will you later help me
change my window frames?” This form of mutual help is deeply rooted
in village cultures. For example, twentieth-century Hungarian
villagers would always divide up the pork yield of each slaughtering.
Everyone would always have something to eat as they continued to
slaughter and share pigs throughout the year.

A single project can
thus combine design and research, foster social responsibility, and
build infrastructure. And none of this requires reinventing the
wheel. All it takes is combining existing technologies—adobe
brick-molding and straw insulation on one side, module-based building
as well as solar and wind power on the other. For example, the
pre-built modules use state-of-the-art computerized numerical control
to integrate regional insulation materials (reed, clay, straw), thus
wedding high-tech technologies with local materials. And adobe brick
might even become a top export article from the region if the product
can be marketed to leaders in biological and ecological architecture,
such as Germany or Austria.

From idea to implementation

Péter Pozsár and
his team envision building about 7,000 houses between 2015 and 2021,
each within a short building phase of three to five weeks. But this
number could rise, as the Hungarian Home Builders’ Association
projects a need for an estimated 40,000 new residential units each
year.

About 65,000 euros’
worth of R&D is yet to be done before the program can launch.
This effort should also include a thorough analysis of the social and
economic situation of the target regions as well as the needs of its
residents. The idea had been informally presented to the members of
the Hungarian parliament three years ago, yet budget constraints kept
it grounded until now.

Pozsár and his
teammates consider module houses a great solution not only for the
poor but also for the young. Families from around the country can
apply to the two planned model neighborhoods, which will each have
six or seven homes. The Hungarian Olcsóház-project
is now waiting to finally get off the ground. Anyone who believes in
the potential of the project is welcome to get in touch with the
initiators.